Two Uber Cool Tools Facebook Ads Forgot To Tell You About

1.59 BILLION Monthly Active Users (MAU). 144 BILLION Mobile MAU. 100 MILLION hours of video watched A DAY! The numbers are staggering, yet there are still lots (and lots) of people who think advertising on Facebook is a waste of money and provides no value. Now admittedly, while Facebook has come a long way in developing better resources/tools for advertisers, they still do a relatively terrible job of disseminating tips, tricks and updates. While there have been a lot of updates to the Facebook ads platform the past six months, we’re just going to look at two:

Audience Overlap:

I can’t even find an explanation of this in Facebook’s help section; I just happened to stumble across it in the ads manager (it’s also available in Power Editor.)

As viewed in Power Editor:

As viewed in Facebook Ads manager:

What is it? Audience overlap will allow you visualize the % of overlap across five different audiences, which can be pulled from custom audiences, saved audiences or lookalikes.

Why is it important? I won’t go into all the use-cases, but a simple example would be this: you are running a campaign with two ad sets using different custom audiences (or lookalikes or saved audiences). What if these custom audiences were actually very similar and you were simply bidding against yourself by having them in different ad sets? The below screenshot highlights the overlap between two different conversion-based lookalikes for a client. We expected there to be overlap here and honestly I’m surprised it’s not higher

Facebook’s Shutterstock integration:

If you’ve run Facebook ads, you know how important creative is. You also know how challenging it can be to continuously update & build new, engaging creative. What if you had easy access to a huge vault of professional, high quality images right in Facebook ads?

That’s where Facebook’s integration with Shutterstock comes into the picture. Honestly, I’ve rarely used this up until recently, even though it’s been available for over two years. But recently I’ve found it be extremely helpful, especially when we’re working with clients that either don’t have the internal resources, or if they do, turnaround times are way too slow. Now I know what you’ll say. “But who wants to use stock photography!?!? It’s so un-original!” I get it and there are absolutely cases where it’s paramount that the creative is “on-brand” … stock photography will never work in those situations. But there are LOTS of instances when stock photography, when chosen wisely, can work just fine. And Shutterstock has millions of images to choose from – FOR FREE – some of which are extremely interesting and can really make an ad pop.

There are some limitations of course, the main one being that the Shutterstock library is only available for single-image ads (no carousel, no slideshows … boo)

Accessing it is easy. In Power Editor, when you’re adding an image, there will be an option for Stock Images. Run a search on whatever theme you’re interested and more often than not, you’ll find a huge selection of images to choose from.